Field of Invention
The invention relates to conversational interaction techniques and, more specifically, to capturing and exploiting user intent in a conversational interaction.
Description of Related Art and Context
A conversational interaction system for information retrieval engages in a dialogue session with a user, using text or speech input from the user. The system determines a user intent to generate a response, which can be final or intermediate. A final response delivers results that the user intended, and an intermediate response (or an intermediate question) tries to clarify and disambiguate the user intent by requesting additional information from the user.
One interaction session can include multiple query-response exchanges between a user and the conversational interaction system. In each exchange, the user makes a query, and the system returns with a response. The user may provide a related or independent query which starts the next query-response exchange.
Typically, an information retrieval system delivers a response based on the last input. As set forth in more detail below, implementations of the invention improve upon this style of interaction by extracting information from earlier exchanges to better understand the context and scope of the conversation (or a conversation state).